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The Man Behind Trump’s ‘Invisible Wall’

USCIS Director Lee Francis Cissna is the son of an immigrant, the son-in-law of a refugee and a man who says he’s just obsessed with the fair implementation of laws. So why is he making them so much harder for immigrants?

This summer, as anger over the separation of migrant families at the border boiled over, and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement became a rallying cry for left-leaning Democrats, a number of less scrutinized, more arcane reforms were quietly working their way into the most foundational laws governing U.S. immigration.

One was the establishment of a “denaturalization task force” that pledges to investigate immigrationfraud and strip away citizenship in such cases—something that’s historically been reserved for serious criminals or terrorists.Another was a new memo that allows visa officers to deny applications without first requesting more evidence or notifying an applicant.

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Then there’s the refugee program, which has been decimated as the administration slashes the level of admissions and redirects its resources to domestic asylum cases—people who have already arrived safely in the United States. Andcoming soon: a controversial proposed regulationthat could prevent immigrants from obtaining green cards if they or their family members have used a public benefit, which is expected to include everything from food stamps to health insurance programs.

The man overseeing these reforms isn’t Stephen Miller, the White House aide publicly known as the architect of President Donald Trump’s most restrictionist immigration policies. It’s Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency that not only facilitates legal immigration, but historically celebrates it. Miller is rightly seen as the mastermind of Trump’s far-reaching immigration crackdown, but Cissna is arguably just as important because he makes it happen.

Much less visible than Miller or Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Cissna has quietly carried out Trump’s policies with a workmanlike dedication. From his perch atop USCIS, he’s issued a steady stream of policy changes and regulations that have transformed his agency into more of an enforcement body and less of a service provider. These changes have generated blowback from immigrant advocates, businesses and even some of his own employees. Leon Rodriguez, who served as USCIS director under President Barack Obama, said the agency is sending a message “that this is a less welcoming environment than it may have been before.”

While the travel ban and family separations grabbed headlines, Cissna has waged a quieter war,tightening and reworking regulations and guidance that make it harder to come to the U.S. as an immigrant or temporary worker.Most of the changes are technical and haven’t drawn the legal challenges of Trump’s more high-profile immigration moves. But the policy revisions could reshape legal immigration flows in the coming years, as visa applications that might have passed muster a few years ago are rejected. And the changes made at USCIS, which have pushed visa officers toward the law enforcement space, will continue unless a new director reverses course.

Ur Jaddou, who was chief counsel at USCIS during the Obama administration and now works as director of DHS Watch, a project of the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, views Cissna as part of a broader faction of immigration hawks in the administration.“I think they want to achieve radical changes in immigration policy to take us backwards to a time when immigration to the country was quite limited,” she said. “For many, many years, they’ve tried to do it legislatively and they haven’t been successful.”

The path to how Cissna, a political appointee with a long record of government service, got here is unlikely. In interviews with 20 current and former coworkers,classmates and friends, he comes across as a puzzle: someone obsessed with law and order in the immigration system, framing his own philosophy as a return to the intent of the law—but whose interpretations consistently trend in the direction of making life harder for people who want to come and stay in the United States.

At the same time, acquaintances describe him as a thoughtful policy expert with a passion for cultures and language.He’s the multilingual son of a Peruvian immigrant and speaks Spanish to his two young children. His wife’s mother—born in the West Bank city of Ramallah—arrived in the United States as a Palestinian refugee in 1957, according to immigration documents. Cissna worked at law firms in his late 20s and early 30s, after which his career trajectory ran through the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. There, Cissna became an expert on immigration policy before moving into more political terrain working with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He has, according to most who know him, never been animated by apparent anti-immigrant sentiment.

And according to Cissna, that hasn’t changed. “I just feel a strong commitment to the law, and to the rule of law,” Cissna told Politico Magazine during an early September interview in his office in USCIS headquarters. “None of the things that we’re doing, as I’ve said on numerous public occasions, are guided by any kind of malevolent intent.”

To immigration experts and advocates, though, the changes at USCIS are clearly motivated by an overarching goal. Tyler Moran, managing director of the pro-migrant D.C. Immigration Hub, sees Cissna’s agenda at USCIS as an extension of Trump’s nationalist approach to immigration. “I think it’s pretty simple,” she said. “They don’t want to let more people into the country. … They just want to put the invisible wall up.”

The puzzle of Cissna’s transformation, from a Foggy Bottom policy wonk to string-puller in the president’s broader immigration agenda, is a window into how the Trump administration’s defining obsession has spread into even the most workaday parts of the immigration bureaucracy—and rendered it into something utterly unrecognizable to many veterans of the system, and utterly fearsome to those suddenly caught in its net.

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In February, USCIS, typically the quietest of the three agencies that deal with immigration, made headlines when Cissna rewrote its mission statement,a symbolic move that alarmed some employees.Now, instead of securing “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants,” USCIS’ stated mission is to administer “the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity … securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”In particular, critics viewedthe removal of a reference to a “nation of immigrants” as an affront to core American values. Cissnatold POLITICO at the time that such sentiments “belong chiseled in stone or chiseled in our hearts,” not front-and-center in a bureaucratic slogan.

Despite his effort to downplay the significance of the new mission statement, it presaged a stream of policy changesat USCIS throughout the spring and summer that have made it more difficult for immigrants to enterthe U.S. legally and stay once they’ve arrived.

The denaturalization task force, which aims to strip immigrants of their citizenship in cases where it was obtained fraudulently, was perhaps the most extreme to immigration advocates. Cissna framed it inlaw enforcement terms.“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna told the Associated Press in June when he announced the effort. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.” Just one month earlier, the Justice Department had sued to denaturalize a 63-year-old Peruvian grandmotherwho pleaded guilty in 2012 to playing a small part in a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme.

Other changes at USCIS will make it more difficult for certain people to obtain legal status. Also in June, the agency issued guidance that expanded the circumstances in which USCIS officers can initiate deportation proceedings. The updated guidance—the implementation of which has been postponed—orders officials to issue a “notice to appear” when a visa applicant is denied and lacks legal status. Out-of-status immigrants could now face deportation for trying to legalize. For instance, an immigrant might have legal status when he or she applies for a visa, but might have slipped out of status by the time the application is processed—and could be deported for such a processing delay. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute told Politico Magazine the new policy could lead to a sharp increase in the number of people placed into deportation proceedings each year, with the possibility the agency could issue up to 260,000 notices in a year. That’s nearly triple the roughly 92,000 notices issued in fiscal year 2016.

Another major shift could lead to swifter processing of applications, or at least swifter denials, by removing second chances for some applicants. Earlier this month, a new policy kicked in that allows USCIS officers to deny visa applications without first issuing a request for additional evidence or a “notice of intent to deny,” which provides an explanation for the rejection. The second chances were part of an Obama-era policy.

Some law enforcement-oriented USCIS employees have cheered the new direction. But other workers who cherished the spirit of welcoming immigrants have been demoralized by the changes, a pain felt with particular acuteness within the refugee and asylum directorate. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Mondaythat the administration would accept no more than 30,000 refugees in the coming fiscal year, the lowest level since the start of the resettlement program in 1980. That comes after Trump slashed the refugee cap to 45,000 in fiscal year 2018, a stark drop from 110,000 admissions proposed by Obama in 2016.

Cissna soon will roll out what could be the most controversial regulation to come out of his agency under Trump. The proposed regulation, known as the “public charge” rule, aims to keep immigrants from entering or staying if they’re expected to be a drain on taxpayers—a strategic attack on both legal immigration and public benefits that likely will trigger yet another immigration court battle. A core provision of the regulation could block an immigrant from obtaining a green card if the person or a family member receives a wide range of public benefits, according to leaked drafts of the measure. The proposed regulation, which is expected before the midterm elections, would effectively gentrify the legal immigration system, blocking poorer immigrants from obtaining green cards or even from entering the country in the first place.

The chilling effect has taken root already. Health service providers claim more immigrants have turned down government aid for infant baby formula and food for children out of a fear it could create a black mark on a green card application. The move also demonstrates the Trump administration’s willingness to promote controversial immigration policies even after the fallout over family separations at the border.

The man at the center of this quiet overhaul is Cissna, who, by most accounts, never wanted to be seen as a Spanish-speaking analog to Stephen Miller. People who know Cissna view him as a policy wonk and dutiful civil servant, not someone philosophically opposed to immigration. Most of the friends and associates I spoke with portray him as non-ideological and pro-immigrant, even as he has helped craft the most radical anti-immigration agenda since the 1950s. “When you work in an administration, to a large degree, you implement that administration’s policies,” said a longtime friend whose employer had not authorized him to speak on the record.

One former DHS colleague who similarly did not have employer permission to speak to a reporter said Cissna cared deeply about security and the integrity of the immigration system—even if it meant shutting out sympathetic cases. “He was always willing to have the trade-off that some deserving people were left out,” the former colleague said, “rather than having the inverse, where some undeserving people were let in.”

But while some see him simply as a good soldier in Trump’s administration, others have been appalled at his willingness to embrace what they consider a nativist agenda.Some of his most outspoken critics emerged this summer in the aftermath of the family separation policy. In July, nearly 400 alumni and community members of Sidwell Friends School, a prestigious Washington, D.C.-based Quaker academy, called on him to reconsider his role in Trump’s crackdown. Cissna, who was born in Silver Spring, Md., graduated from the school in 1984.

The former students argue that the Constitution and Cissna’s own morality required him to fight for more humane immigration policies. “We’re pretty stunned that a guy who is compassionate, funny, proud of his immigrant mother from Latin America, that he would now be one of the key architects of the seemingly heartless policy of separating families,” said Dan Manatt, a documentary filmmaker who helped organize the Sidwell letter and also attended Georgetown Law School with Cissna.

Manatt recalls a more whimsical “Francis” who in law school would draw cartoons and write short stories and poetry. The filmmaker, who has three young children, felt compelled to speak out when he heard stories of families separated at the border. “I’ll admit it, I was triggered,” he said. “To me, it’s unconscionable that Francis is doing this.”

Garen Meguerian, a Philadelphia area-based civil rights lawyer and a former Georgetown classmate, said he was stunned to learn that Cissna was playing a central role in Trump’s best-known immigration moves. “If you had asked me back in law school who would be the person most likely to be supporting this administration with some digressive, draconian immigration policy, I probably would have picked any person in our section of the class over Francis,” he said.

Meguerian, whose own family fled to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1978, said Cissna considered himself “of deep Catholic faith”—the sort of spiritual commitment that would seemingly be at odds with splitting up families at the border. “I just don’t get it,” Meguerian said.

Whatever these friends or other critics think of Cissna’s motivations, most agree that he operates from a place of rich knowledge about immigration policy. For most of his career, he has cultivatedthe image of a technocrat rather than an ideologue. At a mid-August event hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that promotes lower levels of immigration, Cissna appeared onstage with a hefty prop—a copy of the Immigration and Nationality Act, replete with yellow sticky notes marking certain sections. (Cissna’s appearance at an event thrown by CIS, a group has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, triggered a political uproar, but Cissna told me he “thought that the event was fine” and that it broached immigration issues “in a respectful and perfectly reasonable manner.”) In conversation, he cites immigration statutes by number, at once illustrating his grasp of the policy and inability—or unwillingness—to boil it down to talking points.

Cissna developed his encyclopedic knowledge of immigration law over decades working as a civil servant and private attorney. He worked at several law firms in the mid- to late 1990s, then joined the State Department as a consular officer in 1999. He took a temporary assignment in Port au Prince, Haiti, but soon moved to Sweden, where he became chief of the Stockholm division that dealt with temporary visas.

For Cissna, the September 11 terror attacks were a defining moment in his career. “It was a pretty horrific day for all of us in the consular service overseas,” he told me. How on Earth, Cissna wondered, had the hijackers made it through the system? “I, like everybody else in the field, naturally began to focus more intently on how this could have happened, what we can do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.” He added that 9/11 “changed everything” and that “immigration could no longer be viewed the same way it was before.” A comprehensive 2004 government report on the attacks found that border officials potentially could have intercepted as many as 15 of the 19 hijackers.

Cissna left the State Department in 2002 (he cited personal reasons) and joined a Richmond, Va.-based law firm.At the firm, Cissna prepared a “full range of non-immigrant and immigrant visa petitions for corporate, academic, and individual clients” and advised the Virginia attorney general's office regarding immigration bills introduced in the state's legislature, according to a questionnairehe filled out regardinghis USCIS nomination. Three years later, he moved to USCIS, where he worked in the chief counsel’s office and assisted immigration reform efforts promoted by President George W. Bush—policy proposals that immigration hawks scorned as “amnesty.” He then shifted to the Homeland Security Department’s policy shop, where he worked from 2006 to 2015 and where he eventually become a director during the Obama administration.

By now a seasoned policy expert, with experience at both State and DHS, Cissna was detailed in 2015 to the office of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and immigration hard-liner. While still a DHS employee—essentially on loan to the Judiciary Committee—he moved into overtly political territory for the first time in his career.Supported by Cissna’s expertise, Grassley sent a constant stream of immigration-related letters to Obama administration officials, bludgeoning them with broad requests for information. In one particularly far-reaching petition, the senator demanded to know “in precise detail” why 250,000 “aliens” had been allowed to enter the United States over a seven-year period.

Then came Trump. In 2016, Cissna volunteered for his campaign, because, he says, he “supported the campaign’s positions on fidelity to the immigration laws and, in particular, protection of American workers and jobs.”

Cissna’s broad career experience made him well-positioned to tackle Trump’s ambitious immigration agenda, even with limited management experience. Jessica Vaughan, a policy expert with the Center for Immigration Studies who interacted with Cissna during his detail to Grassley’s office, said the wide-ranging knowledge is necessary for the head of an agency like USCIS“where the devil is in the details.”

And Cissna has gotten big results by tweaking those small details. The administration has admitted just 20,825 refugees with the fiscal year nearly over—less than half of Trump’s already historically low ceiling. The percentage of immigrant visas processed for extended family members fell to 9 percent in 2017, down from 22 percent in the previous year, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. And new USCIS policies that affect visa processing for foreign workers have also been apparently significant enough to bring on the ire of businesses. Cissna argues that the administration hasn’t made major reforms to the H-1B visa program, which allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers,but his agency has made smaller changes like the suspension of a fast-track processing program for companies and the planned rollback of work authorization for spouses of H-1B visa holders.In a letter in August, 60 CEOs from some of the biggest companies in the world ripped the “arbitrary and inconsistent adjudications” of visa petitions, which they argued have created an environment of uncertainty when it comes to hiring and retaining foreign workers.

Cissna sees no conflict in shaping policies that could have kept his own family out of the United States if they had been implemented several decades ago. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to advocate for a policy that I think is better for the country, even if it might affect or have affected my own family personally,” he told me.

His family members haven’t questioned his efforts to crack down on immigration, Cissna contends. “When I’m offered the opportunity to actually explain what we’re doing, it makes sense,” he said. “I explain that such and such policy that’s being depicted by the media or by opponents of the policy as some sort of nefarious plot is in fact just an attempt to bring the agency’s actions back in line with the law. And when I explain that, I think people understand it.”

Despite his success at avoiding the spotlight, Cissna has played key roles in Trump’s more controversial immigration policies. During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2017, the nominee denied authoring the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban, which caused chaos in airports worldwide. However, Cissna said he offered technical assistance to the Trump transition team “on a variety of different immigration-related matters.”He also had a role in the “zero-tolerance policy” that led to family separations. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April that the Justice Department would prosecute all illegal entry cases referred to the DOJ, Cissna and other Homeland Security agency leaders sent a memo to Nielsen. The memo offered several choices, including the option to refer all suspected border crossers for federal prosecution. DHS adopted the policy, which pushed family separations into overdrive and caused a national uproar.

And today, he doesn’t regret it, even after Trump signed an executive order in June that ended separations by exempting families from the zero-tolerance policy. “If you want unlawful crossings to diminish or end, then there need to be consequences,” he told POLITICO.

One exception to Cissna’s low profile came last December, when he unexpectedly took over the White House daily press briefing after a pipe bomb attack in New York City injured five people. Akayed Ullah, the suspect in the case, was a lawful permanent resident from Bangladesh who came to the U.S. using a visa for nieces and nephews of citizens.

At the podium, Cissna sought to tie the incident to the need to reform the immigration system to move away from “chain migration.” Bobbing awkwardly and fidgeting with his hands, Cissna launched into a professorial description of the family-based immigration system and the diversity lottery program, which allowed Ullah’s uncle—who sponsored him for a visa—to obtain citizenship in the first place. “Hundreds of thousands of people come into this country every year based on these extended-family migration categories,” he said. “That is not the way that we should be running our immigration system.”

A White House reporter, in the final question of the session, asked whether Cissna’s own mother and mother-in-law would have been able to enter the U.S. under the changes he was proposing. He dodged the question, saying that policymakers “should not be handicapped or shackled” by the fact that their own families may have benefited from a certain program. “Everybody in this room has benefited from the immigration laws of the past,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that every generation doesn’t have its own prerogative, its own duty and responsibility to look at the situation that we have now and determine for itself, ourselves, whether the immigration laws should be changed. It’s perfectly rational.”